Objectives:

• To discuss how to research well for an essay
• To discuss the importance of an outline

Data gathering is one of the most important parts of composing good English essays. The research that you do more than anything, determines whether you’ll be turning out a quality paper. Here, we’ll be looking at the different ways in which you can make sure that you gather enough data to support your English compositions.

List down keywords

This helps your search, especially when you’re researching online which helps you get to more sources faster. Remember that at this point you need to work side-by-side with your outline. This helps you determine what keywords are useful and which ones can be set aside or saved for another project. This also helps you determine your timetable: are your resources going to be hard to find? Is it readily available?

List down all viable sources

There’s no shame in listing down all resources, however implausible they may seem. If there’s someone who you think you could contact but they’re not in the same country, list it down anyway—you can proceed as you go along. Next, rearrange your possible sources according to how easily accessible they are. Again, this helps you plan out what to do next.

Gather information based on probability

First, try to get in touch with your readily available resources; this gives you a head start when it comes to data gathering: here, the worst-case scenario is that you don’t gather any information; by first tapping the resources which you know will be there, this possibility is eliminated. Once you already have this information, you can proceed to focus on the information that you want but is a little far-fetched—write to the proponent of a study you think is relevant or try to reach experts and e-mail them, explaining your cause. This way, you’ll be able to gather as much information as you can without any losses in time or resources. Also, if you are able to get your hands on information you thought would be too difficult to attain, then that’ll be a pleasant surprise. This method of data collecting gets you more information, faster.

In school, the application of this is obvious—you can go to libraries or talk to professors or teachers, you can try archives and/or online journals. At work, this gives you time to review files or company archives which are accessible to you as well as do appropriate research via phone or interviews, depending on the composition task being asked of you. Working effectively and efficiently helps us make the most of our time allotted for the project.

Trim accordingly

Once you have all your information, it’s important to hack off what you don’t need. A lot of people feel hesitant to delete certain things from their papers—remember that your fidelity shouldn’t be to the length of the paper but to its quality. Make sure that you’re able to omit all unnecessary information before you submit your paper or finalize your draft. This will ensure that you’re successfully able to compose a clear, cohesive English composition.

In this lesson, we were able to discuss how to research well and how to cover all your bases when it comes to data gathering. We were also able to list down a few techniques that we can observe when researching that’ll ensure that we’re able to write good, quality compositions.

Next up we’ll be looking at to do with the information that we’ve gathered and organized: how do we begin writing our first draft? Keep reading and we’ll be taking the last few steps toward being great at English compositions.